Creating PDF forms for on- and offline use to collect data for further processing

Rendering pre-filled PDF forms to send out to customers/users for completion and physical signature etc.

In a lot of cases those PDF documents are what’s called an XFA-based PDF form/template. XFA is Adobe’sXML Forms Architecture and a proprietary technology to describe form information. I spare you the technical details, but essentially quite often those XFA-based forms get wrapped into a PDF document, this is done by rendering the XFA information over a PDF page background.

JP Terry has done it again! JP is the CEO of SmartDoc Technologies and he’s released the second edition of his very popular Adobe LiveCycle Designer book. The first version sold over 11,000 copies! This edition has all-new sections of best practices for PDF forms and is up-to-date with Designer ES4 features.

Read about what is included and find a purchase link in this blog post.

In LiveCycle Workspace, there are various notifications that are logged according to the operation performed. But sometime there could be a need to suppress a particular message (as happened in one of our customer scenario).

LiveCycle ES4 SP1 i.e service pack 1 is released and now available for download from Adobe’s Download page It is the first service pack that has been released on top of LiveCycle ES4 which was released in March 2013.

When you convert a file that contains characters of Middle-Eastern or Indic languages to a PDF document, the characters of Middle-Eastern and Indic languages does not appear in the output document. To convert the documents that contain characters of Middle-Eastern or Indic languages to a PDF document, use Adobe Acrobat WebCapture.

In my last post on Mobile Form data submission, I discussed how to submit data directly to a LiveCycle process. In ES4 LiveCycle Mobile Form, one needed to deploy the custom package shared in this blog. In ES4 SP1, submission to any LC process is even more easier to do. Now you don’t need custom package any more.

Microsoft released hotfix 2815716 to resolve the issue which restricted different users running in a single session (using runas command) to print from 32 bit applications. This restriction earlier forced the users to end the Splwow64.exe process manually before using the runas command to print from a 32-bit program with different user account in a single session.

This restriction required LiveCycle PDF Generator service to terminate splwow64.exe before Microsoft Office and other native conversions could be executed (though this termination was not done in case it was known that non-availability of Splwow64.exe would not cause a failure).

To know more about this development and its impact on LiveCycle, read Sudhanshu Singh's blog post.

The workflows around Mobile Form generally involve rendering a form in the browser and then capture data and submit it back to the server. You cannot render the form if you are not connected to the server. In general, data capture step doesn’t need any connectivity from server except in case of running any script on server side or executing a web service. But connectivity is very critical in case of form submission. If you are not connected to the server and you submit the form, you would get just 404 error page and you data would be lost.